MURRAY, HENRY A. (1893-1988)

American psychologist and psychoanalyst Henry A. Murray was born in New York City on May 13, 1893, and died in Boston on June 23, 1988. He was one of the most important pioneers who introduced psychoanalysis into American academic psychology.

Originally trained as a physician, he was analyzed by both Carl G. Jung and Franz Alexander, and became one of the founding members of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society. Not only was Murray a leader in the field of personality theory, but Murray (with the help of Christiana Morgan) created the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT). He also took a leading role in making psychological profiles for the American government's Office of Strategic Services during World War II. For years Murray headed the Harvard Psychological Clinic, originally founded by Morton Prince, and he also worked on the writings of Herman Melville for almost half of his long life. Although Murray took a wholly independent path apart from both Freudian and Jungian organizations, his contact with both men has to be considered historically memorable.

Although Murray was self-taught as a psychologist, he felt proud to be in the humanistic tradition of a philosopher like William James. He remains notable for having inspired generations of graduate students. His TAT test was a means of drawing forth from people by means of words and stories important aspects of personality that an individual could or would not volunteer. The TAT test was designed to be both a diagnostic tool and a research tool. His most famous single book, which was the outcome of collaborating with others at his Psychological Clinic, was Explorations in Personality (1938). He also co-edited, with the Harvard anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn, an influential book of readings, Personality in Nature, Culture, and Society (1948).

Murray, along with Kluckhohn and the sociological theorist Talcott Parsons, helped create the famous, but short-lived, interdisciplinary Department of Social Relations at Harvard. And he was illustrious enough to have been asked to testify as an expert witness in behalf of Alger Hiss in the second trial that ended in Hiss's being convicted of perjury. (Murray's social standing was so secure, one of his forbearers having been the last Tory governor of Virginia, that J. Edgar Hoover's FBI conducted only the most cursory report on him.) Dean Acheson, secretary of state under President Harry Truman, was a classmate of Murray's at Groton, and reported in 1970 that Murray had been the "outstanding" member of their class "in the sense of originality of mind, curiosity about everything, sympathetic personality, catholicity of taste, cultural breadth." Murray felt blocked as a writer, not just in connection with his Melville project but in explaining his whole orientation toward human nature. Yet he remains memorable not just for his emphasis on turning from the abnormal to the normal, and from failure to success, but because he fought against dogmatism in psychoanalysis as unscientific, and insisted on distrusting any truth that became a sect.

Paul Roazen

Bibliography

Anderson, James W. (1988). Henry A. Murray's early career: A psychobiographical exploration. Journal of Personality, 6 (1), 139-71.

Kluckhohn, Clyde and Murray, Henry A. (eds.). (1948). Personality in nature, society and culture. New York: Knopf.

Murray, Henry A. (1938). Explorations in personality. New York: Oxford University Press.

Roazen, Paul. (2003). Interviews on Freud and Jung with Henry A. Murray in 1965. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 48 (1), 1-27.

Robinson, Forrest. (1992). Love's story told: A life of Henry A. Murray. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.